Renewable-heavy grids like Germany use overlapping layers of protection for this sort of thing.
Tier 1 is flywheels because they have the fastest response, and then response isn't regulated by software but instead is purely mechanical
Tier 2 is batteries, they can be made to respond to current or frequency faults in a response time on the order of miliseconds, and the flywheels give you plenty more time than that to make grid-wide orders for the batteries to respond
Tier 3 is gas peaker plants. The batteries are able to buy enough time that if there's a serious fault that could last multiple hours, you're able to spin up (or down) a gas peaker plant to adjust the grid frequency / current.
I find it continually strange how much more attention solar gets than wind.
Wind power has been undergoing a very similar rapid fall in cost, and rapid rise in installations, and is a fantastic natural resource (and also one that complements solar almost perfectly!), but it always feels like solar gets 10x the attention and conversation that wind gets.
My interest is mostly getting solar installed at home, something I can feasibly do. I don't think my city allows for residential wind turbine installs.
Dumb question: is there a limit to how much energy we can capture? I'm imagining a wind gust blowing east to west across a city filled wind turbines. By the time the gust reaches the west end of the city, has most of its energy been captured or otherwise dissipated?
Contrasting that with solar, where any surface area receiving direct sunlight doesn't prevent other adjacent areas from also capturing solar.
Wind power scales with the turbine area squared, and the wind velocity cubed. That means there's massive incentive to make bigger and taller turbines (windspeeds are higher the further away from the ground you are).
For that reason, there is very little reason to build small wind turbines, even if there wasn't a down-stream loss of power from putting too many close together.
So there's the hobbyist side of it, but I guess it's not totally clear why that matters to the people talking about the world's power mix.
But as I write that, I guess it becomes more clear to me that a personal interest in installing the technology makes one pay more attention to it elsewhere, and promote more conversations about it that get others involved.
The learning rate for a solar panel may be higher than a wind turbine, but when you include installation costs, it's no longer the case because the solar panels have become so cheap that the cost is installation-dominated, and installation learns slow.
Over the last 5-10 years, wind has been learning faster than solar.
Granted. This does, however, lead to interesting ideas where one tries to exploit the extreme low cost of panels while minimizing everything else.
I harp on one of this ideas a lot, Standard Thermal's resistive artificial geothermal idea. Their idea is to use densely packed fix orientation (to reduce mounting cost) panels feeding DC resistive heaters to produce heat that is stored in dirt for 100% availability. The projection here is 600 C heat at $3-5/GJ, which is close to the cost of heat from combustion of Henry Hub natural gas (natural gas at the customer end of the pipeline/distribution network will be considerably more expensive.)
It's especially funny that Microsoft has been swearing up and down that they can offer "sovereign" infrastructure in Europe, and yet the moment Trump comes calling they trip over themselves to implement his sanctions against the ICC.
That's a privacy claim which is irrelevant to the question of sovereignty. Even with zero-knowledge processing, they can still just close your account and stop providing any service after a phone-call from the US president.
Vital government functions cannot be allowed to run on this type of infrastructure, it's ridiculous.
I'd love to hear from any US company that makes such a claim, how they will deal if forced by their government to comply due to the patriot act.
In the end the question is very simple, aside from the rare idealist company all companies seek to earn money. How big of a hit would they be willing to take to defend the rights of their foreign customers?
As a European by this point I find US companies about as trustworthy as Chinese ones, if not more so. With Chinese companies you have the Chinese government as a potential attacker. With US companies you have the US government as a potential attacker. Both is bad, but with US companies I feel that they also have a higher tendency to fuck you over as the customer or to change the deal after the fact. Sure usually they should respect EU law when doing business in theEU, but how well is that working out?
Yes at least the Chinese government is pretty consistent. They don't change direction in a day because someone wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.
In the long term this is probably more of a risk because the Chinese strategy actually has long-term planning behind it while the American one is random and a lot of their actions harm themselves more than anyone else. China is the best in the world at playing the long game.
But in the short term the Chinese are more dependable.
those two thirds living in the wrong states for it to matter, wouldn’t have voted the way you wanted and would have resulted in the same distribution of votes we already have?
Correct, the sentiment would have been the same distribution of votes across states. The electoral college distribution would have been the same 312 to 226 and not close at all
The way you talk about things could have easily resulted in California’s 54 electoral college votes flipping to the majority resulting in 366 electoral votes for the winner. Your numbers are spread across where people actually live after all, as opposed to a campaign swing state
What happens if Mistral stopped trying to make foundation models, and then China stopped releasing their open weight models?
It's core to their whole value proposition that they are providing sovereign AI capabilities in Europe. If they're just repackaging Chinese models they don't really provide that sovereignty, and they'd be unable to justify their valuation or investments.
I'd prefer a mid open model as an option, Anthropic + OpenAI are already hiking prices, what when they decide to collude and hike them 100x at some point in the future? I'll be happy with a mid open alternative then.
> You do realize that China is not the only place making open weights models, right?
It's the only place making open weight models close to competitive with American closed-weight models, and the only open-weight models that beat Mistral's models.
> I don't think they're justified now, certainly their results don't justify it. Mistral is mid at best.
Their investors and customers disagree.
> Except they don't, they are dependent on GPUs from nVidia and AMD—both American companies.
That's a pre-existing dependency that nobody in Europe is happy about. The goal with Mistral is to avoid there being yet another new layer of outside dependency. Mistral isn't a GPU company and isn't trying to be.
However, if someone in Europe was able to build a GPU that's as close to Nvidia or AMD as Mistral is to Anthropic or OpenAI, that company would also be seeing a lot of keen interest and likely piles of money.
Regardless though, their reason to exist is not to advance the state of the art.
Their reason to exist is to ensure the sovereignty of France.
Obviously they would do their job better if they were advancing the state of the art, but it's not like it's pointless if they arent the absolute best.
BYD is the number 1 EV brand in the world currently by sales.
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